{"title":"Who My Ideas Come from","authors":"Maggie M. Robbins","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2022.2150818","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2022.2150818","url":null,"abstract":"<p><b>Abstract</b></p><p>The activities of both art making and literary writing afford lots of mental space for the uncontrolled intervention by “creativity,” that difficult-to-describe-let-alone-define quality of original work. In this piece I will discuss the experience of creativity as an ego-dystonic force. Meaning no disrespect to the Muse, I will present this occurrence as a dissociative phenomenon.</p>","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138524793","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"that Was Then, This Is Now: Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy For The Rest Of Us","authors":"Jonathan Shedler Ph.D.","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2022.2149038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2022.2149038","url":null,"abstract":"<p><b>Abstract</b></p><p>Psychoanalysis has an image problem. The dominant narrative in the mental health professions and in society is that psychoanalysis is outmoded, discredited, and debunked. What most people know of it are pejorative stereotypes and caricatures dating to the horse and buggy era. The stereotypes are fueled by misinformation from external sources, including managed care companies and proponents of other therapies, who often treat psychoanalysis as a foil and whipping boy. But psychoanalysis also bears responsibility. Historically, psychoanalytic communities have been insular and inward facing. People who might otherwise be receptive to psychoanalytic approaches encounter impenetrable jargon and confusing infighting between rival theoretical schools. This article provides an accessible, jargon free, nonpartizan introduction to psychoanalytic thinking and therapy for students, clinicians trained in other approaches, and the public. It may be helpful to psychoanalytic colleagues who struggle to communicate to others just what it is that we do.</p>","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-02-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138524797","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A review of When The Garden Isn’t Eden: More Psychodynamic Concepts from Life","authors":"Gurmeet S. Kanwal","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2199649","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2199649","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46554359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Staying in Touch with Affect: Maintaining Vital Access to the Body while Working Online","authors":"M. Bayles","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2204537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2204537","url":null,"abstract":"Presented here is a verbatim session conducted online. The session integrates the ideas of Aline LaPierre’s therapeutic touch model into psychoanalytic practice. Allan Schore introduced LaPierre’s work in Psychologist/Psychoanalyst in 2003, arguing that, “it is time to reappraise the central role of the operations of the bodily self in psychopathogenisis and treatment” (p. 9). More specifically, he wrote, “Whatever the nature of the clinical issues, there is now solid evidence for the critical role of touch in human psychology and biology” (p. 9). This article presents a somatically informed, right hemispheric way of relating that enlivens and deepens the clinical process. Importantly, it presents a perspective that responds to Russell’s (2015) unease about the loss of functional equivalence as we move our face-to-face sessions online. In particular, with its focus on engaging affect at the somatic level, it addresses Russell’s concern about the loss of the fast paced, body-to body implicit processes, which she argues results in the loss of “the kind of holding environment that supports the in-dwelling of the psyche in the soma” (Bayles, 2016, p. 654).","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45484662","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Meeting Again, Meeting Anew: A Child Patient Returns as an Adult","authors":"D. Novack","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2206508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2206508","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract While many analysts have former patients return to treatment years after termination, it is more unusual for a former child patient to return as an adult. Such situations provide unique windows into development, both the patient’s and the analyst’s. They also present special opportunities for considering the fluidity and bidirectionality of psychic time. I describe my work with Charlotte, a five-year-old patient who returned to treatment with me 20 years later. Through the case, I examine the convergence of old and new representations of self and other, and the interrelation of temporal modes as a co-constructed, emergent aspect of the analytic process. With returning patients, past meets present as old relational patterns, idealizations, fears, and wishes emerge in the here-and-now. This can result in blind spots, repetitions, and enactments, but it can also allow for new, co-created experience, as past and present shape each other in an ongoing dialectic.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45044891","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Swiping on Tinder-Imagining or Just Fantasying in Dating Apps?","authors":"Maya Asher","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2210496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2210496","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Patients often come to treatment with difficulties in creating and forming romantic relationships. As therapists, we accompany them in this delicate and sometimes fraught process. Many patients turn to dating apps (e.g., “Tinder,” “OkCupid”) in order to try and find something truly meaningful to fulfill their lives. These platforms occupy their everyday lives, consuming their time and mental energy. The present article suggests that observing some of the unique qualities of interactions that take place in dating apps may provide a lens that reflects, emphasizes, and teaches us about human struggles of intersubjectivity, complexity, and sense of agency, which are at the core of psychoanalytic interest. Clinical examples illustrate these psychic aspects, as well as the way they may be processed in the therapeutic encounter.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45077057","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A review of Core Competencies of Relational Psychoanalysis: A Guide to Practice Study and Research","authors":"John V. O’leary","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2022.2158660","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2022.2158660","url":null,"abstract":"Here we have a book that strives and mostly succeeds, to capture the scope and the marrow of Relational Psychoanalysis in all of its media: practice, theory and research. A book with the title Core Competencies of Relational Psychoanalysis; A Guide to Practice, Study, and Research can seem both awe inspiring and confusing at the same time. To develop a broad and deep, comprehensive evaluation of any theory or mode of thought and praxis and to then further break that theory down into essential components, would be an overwhelming task. This undertaking for Relational Psychoanalysis presents special challenges, indeed. Relational thought was born in reaction to the perceived authoritarianism of other models of psychological and analytic thought. One must avoid reducing the definitions of postmodernism to a critique of metanarratives since then it will be almost impossible to compare the truthfulness of one story-line or theory with another. The least that a psychoanalyst might expect from a text-like work is an adherence to objectivity and a desire for all the so-called “facts” in a vivid and hierarchical manner. The pervasive multiplicity of Relational Theory seems a further obstacle to classification. Multiplicity pervades the relational world. It is found in multiple theories of motivation; the notion of multiple selves; multiple perspectives; the critique on binary thinking especially","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42915767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Intersectionality and Relational Psychoanalyis: New Perspectives on Race, Gender and Sexuality","authors":"G. Straker","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2022.2162307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2022.2162307","url":null,"abstract":"This book offers an exceptional integration of theories of intersectionality with relational psychoanalytic practice organized into four themes: queer identities, exploitation of women, immigrant experience and clinical theory. However, each chapter is so distinct they deserve separate comment. Belkin’s opening paper immediately introduces us to the complexity of this area and the impossibility in the hurly burly of the clinic to immediately access all relevant dimensions of intersectionality. Belkin, a white gay man recounts his work with Ana, a straight woman of color. Despite Belkin’s gayness, Ana says that he reads like a privileged white male, inhabiting privilege as a right. She does not experience him as marginalized. In response, Belkin wonders how this straight woman dare pontificate to him. Thus, while Ana elides Belkin’s marginalized sexual identity, Belkin in response elides her marginalized racial identity. Throughout the chapter Belkin lays claim to his less privileged gay identity and not to his more privileged male and white identities, despite that these privileged identities are the ones that Ana challenged. He wishes his gay, underdog status to be recognized and to his credit he courageously owns this. In this wish for an underdog status to be acknowledged when challenged concerning dominance, Belkin reveals his humanness. It is a dynamic with which I am very familiar through my work with the Apartheid Archives and it is explored in papers by Eagle and Bowman (2010). Thus, this very important lead chapter reminds us early on that when asked to check our privilege, it is easy","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49121598","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lost in a Universe of No Inherent Meaning: Psychoanalysis and Existentialism","authors":"Zvi Steve Yadin","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2210489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2210489","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Addressing the patient’s anxieties about the meaning of life and death as integral phenomena of the life cycle is not commonly discussed in the analytic literature. A central dilemma of analytic work is the effort to facilitate change in the life of a suffering patient while also bearing in mind the inescapable human destiny, i.e., the certainty of death. All too often, these factors remain in the background while dealing with other conflicts or misfortunes. The analyst, like the patient, is aware of the brevity of life and is susceptible to the same fate, and thus may feel defenseless, helpless, and limited in what can be offered. This article incorporates the existentialist thinking of Camus on the subject and illuminates it with analytic work with unspoken trauma of a second-generation Holocaust survivor.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48564567","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Ruptures or Disruption: Identity Diffusion and the Therapeutic Relationship","authors":"Michelet Boyer","doi":"10.1080/00107530.2023.2212343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00107530.2023.2212343","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the psychotherapy of personality disorders, the limitations of the self and of interpersonal functioning that underlie all personality pathology are both a main treatment focus and a major obstacle in doing so. These limitations are most intensely manifested within the primary aspect of the psychotherapeutic relationship. The core of personality disorders–identity diffusion–refers to a self, tormented by insignificance and annihilation, and by disconnectedness and mistrust. The infant will have internalized a mental state called the alien self that persists alongside an agentive self. This split leads to two domains of primitive dyadic object relations: one dominated by projection of epistemic yearning onto an idealized object, the other by projection of self-rejection onto a demonized object. The therapist remains an alien object in this way, making cooperation within therapy momentarily or even structurally impossible, with a negative impact on the working relationship, and a greater role of the realistic relationship.","PeriodicalId":46058,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary Psychoanalysis","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46986256","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}